neuroscientist David Eagleman on the competing nature of self
From an interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman on his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.
Wired.com: So if we’re not consciously directing our own decision-making, how do our brains handle the process?
Eagleman: I make this argument about the brain being like a team of rivals. I synthesize a lot of data to show that you are not one thing, but instead your brain is made up of these competing networks that are all battling it out to control this single output channel of your behavior. And so your brain’s like a neural parliament, and you’ve got these different parties in there like the Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians, all of whom love their country and feel that they know the best way to steer the ship of state. But they have differing opinions on how to do it, and they have to fight it out.
This is why we can cuss at ourselves and cajole ourselves and get angry at ourselves, and this is why you can do behavior and look back and think, “Wow, how did I do that?” It’s because you are not one person, you are not one thing. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
I think Incognito is next on my list after The Information.
sex with neanderthals
When the Neanderthal genome was published last year, it offered the first conclusive evidence that humans had swapped genes with our closest hominid cousins. This was seen as another possible way in which humans had driven Neanderthals to extinction — when we couldn’t out-compete them, we simply assimilated them into our bloodlines. But the question of whether we actually gained something tangible from sexual contact with Neanderthals went unanswered.
Until now, that is.
(via @tcarmody)
from the comments
I think the suit is fine, he just had an ill-fitting body.
Protein Synthesis Dance
Thanks to Paul B., who says, “Don’t ask me about the biology. And remember, 1971 really occurred in the late ’60s. Downside: No music credits.”
headline of the day, II
Germany Opens New Nude-Friendly Nature Trails
Update: More naked Germans:
“A German passenger took all his clothes off on the plane,” on Thursday night, an Iberia spokeswoman said.
“Staff on board tried to dissuade him but he became aggressive and finally locked himself in the toilet. The pilot then decided to turn around and land in Madrid.”
headline of the day
Octomom’s fertility doctor has license revoked
Quote out of context
In an effort to salvage at least something from their mishap, many farmers are now feeding the messed-up melons to fish and pigs.
Gene Harrogate?
hamilton’s rules [of robotic] kin selection
Hamilton’s rules of kin selection, a biological explanation of altruism in an evolutionary context, has been shown to apply to robots.
Researchers in Switzerland developed a band of small, rolling robots equipped with sensors and their own “genetic code”—a unique string of 33 1′s and 0′s functioning as individual “neurons” to determine sensor use and behavior—and tasked with foraging for small “food” objects and pushing them to a designated area. Those robots that failed to collect the objects were weeded out of the “gene pool” by the research team, whereas those that were successful could choose whether to collect the food object for themselves or share it with another robot.
“Over hundreds of generations,” the researchers concluded, “we show that Hamilton’s rule always accurately predicts the minimum relatedness necessary for altruism to evolve,” they wrote in a new paper describing the results. The levels of relatedness that the researchers tested included full clones as well as the digital equivalent of siblings, cousins and non-kin.
(via the browser)
two quotes from The Singularity Is Near
Halfway through The Singularity Is Near, you get:
Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life! For now, though, we must rely on our representatives in the lowlands to tell us what water is really like.
– Hans Moravec
and:
The advent of strong AI is the most important transformation this century will see. Indeed, it’s comparable in importance to the advent of biology itself. It will mean that a creation of biology has finally mastered its own intelligence and discovered means to overcome its limitations. Once the principles of operation of human intelligence are understood, expanding its abilities will be conducted by human scientists and engineers whose own biological intelligence will have been greatly amplified through an intimate merger with nonbiological intelligence. Over time, the nonbiological portion will predominate.
Kurzweil spends hundreds of pages establishing dozens of examples that support his ideas, but now you have a better idea of his underlying assumptions.
A Lonely Hunter
This human heart has had the fat and extra tissue removed, leaving pure angel-hair blood vessels to make up its shape.
Via this wonderful collection of curiosities. The internet is a wonderful thing, yes? Yes.
quote out of context
This seems to me like yet another reminder that the brain is one awesomely complicated piece of meat.
Trees cocooned in spider webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan
(Via @josephpearson)
the van-sized robot came to scientific fame after autonomously investigating gene function in yeast
The debate over standardizing science will continue as artificial intelligence continues to improve. In the meantime, King’s team is preparing to publish recent work completed by the newer robot Eve, which is studying drugs used to treat malaria, Chagas disease and other neglected tropical scourges.
That publication, however, is being delayed by issues beyond the ken of artificially intelligent scientists.
“We don’t want it to be exploited for profit by others,” King said. “At this point, the intellectual property issues are holding us up.”
A lot more about artificial intelligence and computer models of scientific thought — a good example of how a short report can give glimpses into dozens of possible futures.
quote out of context
DARPA says a discussion of narrative psychology will lead to a “better understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others.”
headline of the day
Salamander Has Algae Living Inside Its Cells
Amy said
As much as I don’t like snakes, I sure wouldn’t mind having one of their jaws.
What IS a Hyaena?
Over the course of evolutionary time, the family Hyaenidae has contained roughly 100 different species, occupying a wide array of ecological niches. However, the vast majority of these species exist today only in the fossil record. Although most people think of hyenas as large, dog-like creatures with adaptations for cracking bones, this definition is inadequate because some extinct hyenas were much more like modern mongooses or civets than dogs, and many ancient forms had no special ability at all to crack bones. In fact, hyaenas are more closely related to cats than to dogs.
fermented clothes
Lee got the idea for fermenting textiles from a biologist who planted the idea in her mind that she could create a dress from bacteria, yeast and sweetened green tea (or sweetened water). Left to ferment for two to three weeks and the result is bacterial cellulose that, when dried, resembles sheets of translucent paper, vegetable leather or even dried human skin.
The bacterial cellulose might also be used to make furniture or blood vessels, and could potentially replace bone tissue.
‘If protocells like these can be reliably paired with a fully-functional mirror biochemistry, the first truly alien life form may not come from a distant planet, but from a petri dish in a research lab’
Small steps toward understanding, and replicating, the origins of life:
Two simultaneous but distinct approaches have defined the work on the origins and biochemical diversity of life. One approach is from within, following paths that begin with existing Terran biochemistry and move away from its set of molecules and networks in search for alternatives. The other approach is from outside, following paths from plausible prebiotic initial conditions. Both approaches have scored recent breakthroughs. John Sutherland’s lab (University of Manchester), in a brilliant example of systems chemistry, has performed a synthesis of nucleotides—building blocks of genetic molecules like DNA and RNA—in which two of a nucleotide’s crucial parts, the base and the sugar, emerge as a single unit under natural conditions. Moving in the opposite direction, George Church’s lab at Harvard has achieved the successful synthesis of functioning ribosomes—the molecular machines that read genetic code and make the proteins for cells.
“It’s related to the fungus that LSD comes from,” Hughes said. “Obviously they are producing lots of interesting chemicals.”
You know those fungi that infect an ant’s nervous system, turning them into zombies for the fungus’s propagation? They found four more of them.
Of the four new species, two grow long, arrow-like spores which eject like missiles from the fungus, seeking to land on a passing ant. The other fungi propel shorter spores, which change shape in mid-air to become like boomerangs and land nearby. If these fail to land on an ant, the spores sprout stalks that can snag ants walking over them. Upon infecting the new ant, the cycle starts again.
This Is A Metaphor For Something
life on meteorites
Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, studied meteorites in remote areas over a period of ten years and concluded they show significant evidence of extraterrestrial bacterial life.
In what he calls “a very simple process,” Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist: a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to search the stone’s surface for evidence of fossilized remains.
He found the fossilized remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot — here on earth, that is.
“The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. But not all of them. “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.”
Dan Dennett, Dangerous Memes
Here’s one I stumbled on last night.
Words are memes that can be pronounced.
Life in Lake Vostok
Lake Vostok, a fresh water Antarctic lake, has been sealed beneath two and a half miles of ice for 14 million years. But not for much longer.
When the sample can be recovered, however, it’s hoped that it’ll shed light on extremophiles — lifeforms that survive in extreme environments. Life in Lake Vostok would need adaptions to the oxygen-rich environment, which could include high concentrations of protective enzymes. The conditions in Lake Vostok are very similar to the conditions on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, so the new data could also strengthen the case for extraterrestrial life.
Finally, anything living in the lake will have evolved in relative isolation for about 14 million years, so it could offer a snapshot of conditions on Earth long before humans evolved.
Side mirrors are to Italians what whiskers are to cats
